Making it shine

Bean polishers: People who rappel a stainless-steel sculpture and hold 5- to 15-pound sanders up for 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, in 120-degree heat

August 24, 2005|By Emily Nunn, Tribune staff reporter

Only a person who has polished a 66-foot-long, 33-foot-high, 125-ton, hollow, stainless steel kidney-bean-shaped sculpture until it was so shiny you could use it as a shaving mirror could tell you what a cumbersome chore that sort of thing can be, and how long it will probably take you if you decide to attempt the task yourself.

And yet it seems that practically everyone in Chicago has an opinion on whether or not it has taken just a little too long to finish and finally unveil the gargantuan sculpture in question -- Anish Kapoor's dazzling, crowd-pleasing "Cloud Gate," a.k.a. the Bean.

Come Sunday, if things have gone as planned, it will have been completely divested of its massive Quonset-hut-style tent for several days, and the plaza will be opened to the public. While it's not the first time the tent has come off, and the Bean won't actually be "finished" per se, the plan is to leave it alone for a month, then have the workers back on-site beginning in October to finish polishing the portion known as the "omphalos," the interior vortex underneath Cloud Gate. Aside from closing off that area, the plaza will remain open to the public and the Bean will never be forced to wear that dowdy tent again. City officials say the job should be complete by winter 2005-06. But you never know.

And if you ask Danny Kozyra -- the project's 38-year-old general foreman, who has headed the crew of ironworkers since construction began in January 2004 -- there's not much way anyone could have predicted exactly how long such an uncommon task would take. And he should know. He's one of only 25 people in the world who've ever tried it, and they all belong to Ironworkers Local 63.

"Nobody had ever done anything like it before," Kozyra was saying on a recent morning, a few days before the tent-removal process began. It was as hot as an oven inside the tent, where the Bean rose like a pampered space-age egg out of a jumbled nest of wires, stuffed garbage bags and scaffolding. Kozyra and the rest of his crew were wearing protective respirators and white polyethylene jumpsuits, which in spite of their substantial physiques made them look like Oompa Loompas as they buzzed around the gargantuan Bean, buffing and polishing and scrutinizing it from precarious-looking positions on scaffolding and ladders, or stretched out underneath it on the ground.

"If this had been done previously anyplace in the country or the world," said Kozrya, "you can bet [we] would have had someone on the phone asking them to come out here and show us how to do it."

Did testing on process

According to Senior Project Manager Steve Belcaster, of U.S. Equities Realty: "We did some testing last year, to get a better understanding. We welded steel panels in the shop and ground them down to a smooth finish, so you couldn't see the weld anymore -- like a mirror. . . .

"And then when we got up on top out here, it was a totally different story. We couldn't use the method used in the shop, where there were no compound curves. The panels we tested were flat. So the instruments didn't work the same way."

So with Chicago watching, waiting and worrying about money, Kozyra and his crew set about "defining and refining" a process for executing a job that will likely not be done again anytime soon. "It's been extremely painstaking and difficult. Because there's no tolerances and absolutely no room for error," Kozyra said.

The Bean was structurally engineered in London and California, fabricated in California, and then shipped to Chicago in pieces, which Kozyra and crew put together on-site after drilling holes and sinking anchor bolts into the concrete slab above the Park Grill to support it.

But to hear Kozyra tell it, building the Bean was an absolute breeze compared with polishing it.

"From an engineering standpoint it was phenomenal -- just unbelievable," he said, with his respirator pushed back on his head and sweat streaming down his face, as he conducted a private tour of the goings-on in the tent, yelling over the constant roaring noise of sanding equipment, air-cleaning HEPA filters and cooling fans (which weren't helping much).

After erecting the subframe structure -- the two huge rings that rose up in 2004, connected by a network of what looked like erector-set pieces -- the crew placed 168 panels of 3/8-inch thick steel (weighing 1,000-2,000 pounds) over the frame like a dress pattern and sewed them all together with bolts. And it fit almost perfectly, something that surprised Kozrya after 17 years in the business.

No cutting, filing

"I've never been on a job where you could take pieces, in the form they arrive, put them together, and not have to cut them or file or do anything to them."

Instead, the resulting 2,442 linear feet of welded seams and the general dullness of the steel have been the real challenges, because the sculpture had to be brought to a high-grade mirror finish -- something hard enough to pull off on a flat surface much less a curved one as big as a house.